Gear outside the van: rear doors, roof & under the floor

Four ways out of the box

By default the walls, floor and roof hold every item inside the cargo space — that is what makes dragging a cabinet against a wall feel right. Four things get you outside it, from most guided to least: items made for the rear doors, items made for the roof, and two options of the Inspector's Placement control — Under the floor for tanks, the heater, a gas tank, a storage box and your custom components, and Anywhere, which lets any single item go wherever you put it. Placement always shows where an item lives: a roof box reads Roof, a ladder Rear doors, a cabinet Inside the van.

Whichever you use, the item stays part of the build: its weight counts toward payload, the front/rear axle split, the left/right balance and the tilt test, its cost is in the budget, and the plan sheets, the Build Pack cover and the Build Sheet silhouette draw it outside the body with the margin grown to fit.

Measuring works out here too. The measuring tape M picks and snaps on the ground and on the body's outer skin — rear doors, both sides and the roof — as well as inside: click the bottom of a rear door box and then the ground for its clearance, or the ground and the top of a roof box to check the Overall height by hand. How the tool works is in Placing components, under Measuring.

On the rear doors

In the Library, items marked rear doors next to their size mount on the outside of the barn doors: Bike rack, Spare wheel carrier, Rear door box, Jerry can holder and the Rear ladder. Click one and it lands on a free door half; drag it across the rear face to move it. It sits on the outer skin and its orientation is fixed by the doors, so there is no rotation to set.

Press O to open the doors and the gear swings with the door it sits on. An item wide enough to straddle the centre seam — a hitch-style bike rack — is treated as carried by the tow bar and stays put.

Weight behind the rear axle is a lever, so a rear-overhang check watches it: a tip once more than 35 kg hangs on the back (the rating of the common door-mounted bike racks), a warning past 75 kg. The message tells you how much load that takes off the front axle and adds to the rear one.

On the roof, and how tall the van got

Roof items — solar panels, fans, air-con, rails, a roof tent, and now a Roof box and an LED light bar — sit on the real outer roof skin, and the side awning on the real outer wall. Arrange them in roof view; that workflow has its own article: Roof planner, weight map & tilt test.

The Build stats panel carries an Overall height row: the van plus the tallest thing on it, in metres or, with imperial units, in feet and inches rounded up — the way a clearance sign reads. A design check speaks up only when your gear takes the van over a bar the bare van would clear: 2.0 m and 3.0 m in metric (car-park barriers, toll and ferry classes), 7′ 0″ and 9′ 0″ in imperial (parking garages, drive-through bars). A van that is over the bar from the factory gets no message — you already know.

Under the floor: tanks, the heater, gas, boxes and custom parts

The Water tank (125 L and 35 L), the Grey water tank, the Diesel heater, the Gas bottle, the Storage box and every custom component can hang under the van instead of standing in it — batteries, fridges and furniture cannot. Select one and the Inspector's Placement control offers Under the floor between Inside the van and Anywhere; U flips it. Slung under, the item is strapped up against the floor pan, kept between the axles and clear of the tyres, and it snaps into a bay: between the two chassis rails, or into the pocket beside one. Its height is fixed, so the Inspector shows Ground clearance instead of a height field, and a line on the ground shows how much air is left. A gas bottle is laid on its side on the way under — the shape of an underslung LPG tank — and stands up again when it comes back inside.

While an underslung item is selected the floor turns see-through and the floor build-up hides, so you can see what you are doing. Deselect it and the floor covers it again — it no longer reacts to clicks, so you can't grab a hidden tank by accident. To get it back, hold X to look through the floor and click it, press N until the selection reaches it, or click its row in the Components tab.

Six checks come with it: a warning when an item hangs less than 254 mm (10 in) off the road, a warning when it is taller than the space under the floor (it is rested on the road, never through it — make it lower), a warning when it is too wide for the bay between the rails, a frost tip for fresh water outside the insulated shell, an exhaust and carbon-monoxide tip for a heater down there, and a tip for gas: fit a purpose-built underslung LPG tank with a stone guard, clear of the exhaust, and have a gas fitter sign it off. The Grey water tank also completes the water schematic — it collects the drains, and you are told when it is small next to your fresh water. Its weight is the empty tank: the water it collects is already counted in the full fresh tank.

What this does not know about: your van's exhaust, driveshaft, fuel tank and spare wheel. None of them is modelled, and the space behind the rear axle is closed for now because the factory spare usually lives there. Treat the under-floor position as a payload and clearance plan, and check the real underside before you buy a tank.

1. Add the tank or heater from the Library as usual — it arrives inside the van.
2. With it selected, set Placement to Under the floor, or press U. One undo step takes it back.
3. Drag it along the van; it keeps to the bays between and beside the chassis rails.
4. Read Ground clearance in the Inspector and the design checks in Build stats — a flat 200 mm tank usually passes where a tall one warns.

Anything else: Placement — Anywhere

For what the guided mounts don't cover — cladding on the outside, a side step, a box on the tow bar, a light bar on the front bumper, a home-made rack — select the item and set Placement to Anywhere in the Inspector. Every item has the option, roof, rear-door and outside gear included: a freed rear item stops riding its door and can be turned, a freed roof item no longer takes roof space.

On Anywhere, the walls stop holding that one item: drag it or type its position anywhere around the van — about 1 m past the body at the sides, the rear and above the roof, half a metre past the front bumper, and down to the ground, where it rests. While dragging it also snaps flush onto the outer skin of the side walls and the rear doors, so a sheet of ply lands on the body, not near it. And it stays exactly where you left it: nothing re-settles it when you reload, switch the van, or change the shell build-up. Pick the first option again — Inside the van, Rear doors, Roof — and it goes back to its own mount.

The trade is that a freely placed item is on its own. It still counts for weight, axle loads, balance, the tilt test and overall height — but the support check and the heavy-up-high check skip it, nothing stacks on it, and once its centre is outside the cargo box it no longer takes floor area, blocks the aisle or blocks the sliding door. A tip appears when more than 25 kg of freely placed parts sit outside the body, as a reminder that something real has to carry them.